Daphne du Maurier was a British author and playwright. Born in London in 1907 to the prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel Beaumont, she was educated at home and later in Paris. In 1928 she began writing short stories and articles, and in 1931 her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published. Among her best-known works are the novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman’s Creek (1941) and My Cousin Rachel (1951), and the short stories 'The Birds’ (1952) and ’Don’t Look Now’ (1971). Like many of Du Maurier’s novels, Rebecca (1938), an immediate best-seller that has never been out of print, was not at first taken seriously by critics, but has since become recognised as a masterpiece of storytelling. Du Maurier lived most of her life in Cornwall, where many of her books are set. She died in 1989.
Helen Dunmore was a British poet, novelist and children’s writer. Her novels include A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction; The Siege (2001), shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction; and The Betrayal (2010), shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Orwell Prize. Her poetry collections include The Sea Skater (1986), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and The Raw Garden (1988), a Poetry Book Society Choice; her poem ’The Malarkey’ won the 2010 National Poetry Competition. Dunmore’s critical work includes new introductions to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and A Confession. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dunmore died in 2017.